By SHAILA DEWAN
c.2010 New York Times News Service
NEW ORLEANS – After more than three weeks of efforts to stop a gushing oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, BP engineers achieved some success on Sunday when they used a mile-long pipe to capture some of the oil flow and to divert it to a drill ship on the surface some 5,000 feet above the wellhead, company officials said.
After two false starts, engineers successfully inserted a narrow tube into the damaged pipe from which most of the oil is leaking.
“It’s working as planned,” Kent Wells, BP’s senior executive vice president, said at a briefing in Houston on Sunday afternoon. “So we do have oil and gas coming to the ship now, we do have a flare burning off the gas, and we have the oil that’s coming to the ship going to our surge tank.”